Chuck Hagel calls for major Pentagon shake-up

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel called on Wednesday for the most extensive Pentagon structural shakeup in more than 25 years, arguing that the Defense Department has no choice but to adapt to tighter budgets and a changing world.

In his first major policy speech since taking office in February, the former Army infantryman said he has ordered a top-to-bottom review of the building he now runs — targeting things like the procurement system, ballooning personnel and benefit costs, major weapons programs and the command structure itself.

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“The last major defense reorganization, Goldwater-Nichols, was drafted at the height of the Reagan defense buildup and focused on improving jointness and establishing clear operational chains of command,” Hagel said at National Defense University at Fort McNair in Washington, D.C. “Cost and efficiency were not major considerations then,” he said.

Now that sequestration is a reality and defense officials expect what they call “budget pressure” to become a fact of life, Hagel has ordered a “strategic choices and management review,” which he said would seek ways to adapt the Pentagon’s strategy to accommodate those budget cuts. Although Hagel compared what he wants to 1986’s Department of Defense Reorganization Act, he said the threats facing the world today are different from those that President Ronald Reagan and Congress faced in their time.

“Most of the pressing security challenges today have important political, economic and cultural components, and do not necessarily lend themselves to being resolved by conventional military strength,” Hagel said. “Indeed, the most destructive and horrific attack ever on the United States came not from fleets of ships, bombers, and armored divisions, but from 19 fanatical men wielding box cutters and one-way plane tickets. So our military must continue to adapt in order to remain effective and relevant in the face of threats markedly different than those that shaped our defense institutions during the Cold War.

"Since 9/11, the military has grown more deployable, more expeditionary, more flexible, more lethal, and certainly more professional. It has also grown significantly older — as measured by the age of our platforms — and it has grown enormously more expensive in every way.

"For example, it is already clear to me that any serious effort to reform or reshape our defense enterprise must confront the principal drivers of growth in the Department’s base budget — namely acquisitions, personnel costs, and overhead."

Hagel, a former senator from Nebraska, has long been a critic of waste and overspending in the Pentagon’s massive budget, once faulting it as “bloated.” Now that he’s at the helm of the department, he’s making it clear that the days of blank checks are over.